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The past is never dead. It's not even past

Not Even Past

Our New History Ph.D.s

For so many students this year, the cancellation of commencement meant the lack of an important milestone. And in this unsettling time, with it many demands on our attention, it’s possible to overlook the extraordinary accomplishment involved in completing a PhD in History.  So we decided to take this opportunity to celebrate the 2019-2020 class of new UT Austin History PhDs and tell you a little about them and their work.

Each of these students completed at least two years of course work. They read hundreds of books and wrote dozens of papers to prepare for their comprehensive examinations. After that, they developed original research projects to answer questions no one had asked before. Then they did a year or so of research in libraries and archives, before sitting down to write their dissertations. They did all this while working, teaching, caring for their families, having at least a little fun, and, in some cases, writing for Not Even Past!

Here they are, with their dissertation titles (and abstracts, if we have them). CONGRATULATIONS DOCTORS!

Sandy Chang, Assistant Professor, Dept. of History, University of Florida
“Across the South Seas: Gender, Intimacy, and Chinese Migrants in British Malaya, 1870s-1930s”

Across the South Seas explores the migration of Chinese women who embarked on border-crossing journeys, arriving in British Malaya as wives, domestic servants, and prostitutes. Between the 1870s and 1930s, hundreds of thousands of women traveled to the Peninsula at a time when modern migration control first emerged as a system of racial exclusion, curtailing Asian mobility into white settler colonies and nation-states. In colonial Malaya, however, Chinese women encountered a different set of racial, gender, and sexual politics at the border and beyond. Based on facilitation rather than exclusion, colonial immigration policies selectively encouraged Chinese female settlement across the Peninsula. Weaving together histories of colonial sexual economy, Chinese migration, and the globalization of border control, this study foregrounds the role of itinerant women during Asia’s mobility revolution. It argues that Chinese women’s intimate labor ultimately served as a crucial linchpin that sustained the Chinese overseas community in colonial Southeast Asia.

Sandy Chang on Not Even Past:
Podcasting Migration: Wives, Servants, and Prostitutes
A Historian’s Gaze: Women, Law, and the Colonial Archives of Singapore

Chinese Lady-in-Waiting Attending to Her Chinese Mistress’ Hair

Chinese Lady-in-Waiting Attending to Her Chinese Mistress’ Hair, c.1880s (Courtesy of the National Archives of Singapore).

Itay Eisinger
“The Dystopian Turn In Hebrew Literature”

From its inception in Europe during the final decades of the nineteenth century, the Zionist movement promoted, leveraged and drove forward a utopian plan for a Jewish national revival, in the biblical Land of Israel, and in essence framed these plans as a pseudo divine right of the Jewish people. Numerous intellectual, cultural and literary historians therefore have focused on the role of utopian thinking in the shaping of Zionist ideology and Hebrew literature. By way of contrast, this dissertation focuses on the transformation, or evolution, of dystopian poetics within the realm of modern Hebrew literature. … Recent scholarship argues that while early “totalitarian” dystopias tended to focus on the dangers of the all-powerful state, tyranny, and global isolation as the main sources of collective danger to a prosperous and peaceful future, more recently published dystopias – both in the West and in Israel – have moved their focus to other topics and hazards, such as catastrophic ecological or climate disasters, patriarchy, sexism and misogyny, and the rise of surveillance and the integration of the  intelligence community into the all-powerful well-oiled capitalist machine. While I do not disavow such arguments completely, I argue that most Israeli dystopias are still driven primarily by the traditional depiction of an authoritarian-fascist regime run amok – in alignment with the Huxley-Orwell model – while at the same time, explore creatively a vision of Yeshayahu Leibowitz’s prediction in 1967 that the Israeli Occupation of the Palestinians would inevitably force Israel to become a “police state.” … I examine the common themes found in these novels, including the dystopian depiction of an instrumentalization of the Shoah and manipulative abuse of the memory of the Holocaust in order to promote political agendas, allusions to the nakba, the over-militarism and nationalism of the state, the effects of the Occupation on Israeli society, and Israel’s neoliberal revolution…. By examining these novels from this perspective, and creating a dialogue between these works and different critical scholars, this dissertation aims to contribute to the study of Israel by rethinking its history – through the prism of dystopia.

Itay Eisinger on Not Even Past:
Rabin’s Assassination Twenty Years Later

Carl Forsberg, 2019-2020 Ernest May Postdoctoral Fellow in History and Policy at the Harvard Kennedy School’s Belfer Center, 2020-2021 Postdoctoral Fellow with Yale’s International Security Studies Program and the Johnson Center for the Study of American Diplomacy. 
“A Diplomatic Counterrevolution: The Transformation Of The US-Middle East Alliance System In The 1970s”

This dissertation charts the agency of Arab, Iranian, and US elites in transforming the structure of Middle Eastern regional politics and constructing a coalition that persists to the present.  In the decade after the 1967 Arab-Israeli War, the regimes of Anwar Sadat in Egypt, King Faisal in Saudi Arabia, and Shah Mohamad Reza Pahlavi in Iran set out to overturn the legacy of Nasserism and Arab socialism.  Animated by a common fear that their internal opposition gained strength from a nexus of Soviet subversion and the transnational left, these regimes collaboratively forged a new regional order built around the primacy of state interests and the security of authoritarian rule.  They instrumentally manipulated a range of US-led peace processes, including Arab-Israeli negotiations, US-Soviet détente, and conciliation between Iran and its Arab neighbors to advance their diplomatic counter-revolution.  US administrations at times resisted these efforts because they read the region through the polarities of the Arab-Israeli conflict.  After the 1973 War, however, the opportunity to marginalize Soviet influence in the region proved too enticing for US officials to ignore.  My project deploys multi-lingual research conducted in Egypt, Israel, Lebanon, the UK, and the US.  To overcome the lack of open state archives in Arab countries, the dissertation examines US, British, Iranian, and Israeli records of discussions with Arab leaders, as well as memoirs, periodicals, and speeches in Farsi and Arabic, to triangulate the strategies and covert negotiations of Arab regimes.

Celeste Ward Gventer, Post-doc, The Albritton Center for Grand Strategy at the Bush School of Government and Public Service, Texas A&M University.
“Defense Reorganization For Unity: The Unified Combatant Command System, The 1958 Defense Reorganization Act And The Sixty-Year Drive For Unity In Grand Strategy And Military Doctrine”

Pres. Dwight D. Eisenhower and John Foster Dulles at the White House in 1956

This dissertation seeks to answer a deceptively simple question: why, in 1958 and as part of the Defense Reorganization Act (DRA) passed that year, did U.S. President Dwight D. Eisenhower remove the chiefs of the military services from the chain of operational command and instead empower the so-called “unified combatant commands” to lead American military forces in war? The answer, this dissertation will argue, is that Eisenhower had found himself competing with his military service chiefs for his entire first administration and the first half of his second over national (grand) strategy and military doctrine. Taking those service chiefs out of the chain of operational command would, in effect, diminish the role of those officers. Eisenhower had found that simply getting rid of refractory officers was insufficient to quiet their rebellion: only by suppressing their role permanently in the bureaucracy did he hope to unify American strategy- and policy-making. This interpretation is at odds with the few accounts of the 1958 DRA that do exist, which tend to take Eisenhower’s stated purposes—to enhance “unity of command”—at face value. The circumstances that led Eisenhower to take this step were decades, if not longer, in the making. … The situation resulted from the inherent pluralism in American military policy making … it was also a product of the decades that preceded Eisenhower’s administration during which the American military was consistently forced to “fill in the blanks” of national strategy. What drove matters to a head in the 1950s was the steady growth of American power after the 1898 Spanish-American War and, especially, after the Second World War. It is necessary to also appreciate several legacies Eisenhower confronted and that colored his own views: the history of American military thinking about command and about civilian control; the creation of military staffs and the process of reform and professionalization inside the military services during the twentieth century; and the development of independent service doctrines. … This work will trace these conceptual threads over the sixty-year rise of the United States to a global power, culminating in Eisenhower’s standoff with his service chiefs in the 1950s.

Lauren Henley, Assistant Professor, University of Richmond
“Constructing Clementine: Murder, Terror, and the (Un)Making of Community in the Rural South, 1900-1930”

Deirdre Lannon, Senior Lecturer, Department of History, Texas State University
“Ruth Mary Reynolds And The Fight For Puerto Rico’s Independence”

Ruth Mary Reynolds (Women in Peace)

This dissertation is a biography of Ruth Mary Reynolds, a pacifist from the Black Hills of South Dakota who after moving to New York City became involved in the movement for Puerto Rico’s independence…. She bucked the social norms of her conservative hometown to join the Harlem Ashram…. Her work within the Ashram connected her to the web of leftist coalition activism launched by the Popular Front era of the 1930s and 1940s, and to A. Philip Randolph’s March on Washington Movement for black equality. She became involved with organized pacifism, most notably through her membership in the Fellowship of Reconciliation, and her close friendship with its U.S. leader, Dutch-born theologian A.J. Muste. In 1944, Ruth decided to make the issue of Puerto Rico’s independence her own. She helped form a short-lived organization, the American League for Puerto Rico’s Independence, which was supported by Nobel Laureate Pearl S. Buck among others. She became close friends with Pedro Albizu Campos and his family, as well as other Puerto Rican independence activists. She traveled to Puerto Rico, and in 1950 found herself swept into the violence that erupted between the government and Albizu Campos’s followers. Her experiences in New York and Puerto Rico offer a unique lens into the ways in which the Puerto Rican independence movement functioned, and how it was quashed through governmental repressions. Her friendship with Pedro Albizu Campos, the fiery independentista who remains a figurehead of Puerto Rican identity and pride, helps to humanize the man behind the mission. Ruth never abandoned her friend, or their shared cause. She fought for Albizu Campos to be freed, bucking the climate of repression during McCarthyism. This dissertation traces her efforts until 1965, when Albizu Campos died. She remained an active part of the Puerto Rican independence movement until her own death in 1989.

Holly McCarthy
“The Iraq Petroleum Company In Revolutionary Times”

Signe Fourmy, Visiting Research Affiliate, Institute for Historical Studies and Education Consultant, Humanities Texas.
“They Chose Death Over Slavery: Enslaved Women and Infanticide in the Antebellum South”

“They Chose Death Over Slavery,” … examines enslaved women’s acts of infanticide as maternal resistance. Enslaved women occupied a unique position within the slaveholding household. As re/productive laborers, enslavers profited from work women performed in the fields and house, but also from the children they birthed and raised. I argue that enslaved women’s acts of maternal violence bear particular meaning as a rejection of enslavers’ authority over their reproduction and a reflection of the trauma of enslavement. This dissertation identifies and analyzes incidents of infanticide, in Virginia, North Carolina, and Missouri. Using a comparative approach to consider geographic location and household size—factors that shaped the lived experiences of the enslaved—I ask what, if any, patterns existed? What social, economic, and political considerations influenced pivotal legal determinations—including decisions to prosecute, punish, or pardon these women? Expanding on the work of Laura Edwards and Paul Finkelman, I argue that public prosecution and legal outcomes balanced community socio-legal interests in enforcing the law while simultaneously protecting slaveowners profiting from their (re)productive labor. The existing scholarship on slavery, resistance, and reproduction shows that enslaved women were prosecuted for infanticide, yet the only book-length studies of enslaved women and infanticide center on one sensationalized case involving Margaret Garner. Infanticide was more prevalent than the secondary literature suggests. Building upon the work of historians Darlene Clark Hine and Jennifer L. Morgan, I explore how enslaved women re-appropriated their reproductive capacity as a means of resistance. In conversation with Nikki M. Taylor, Sasha Turner, and Marisa Fuentes, I ask what this particular type of violence reveals about the interiority of enslaved women’s lives. Additionally, I explore what these acts of maternal violence reveal about enslaved motherhood—or more specifically an enslaved woman’s decision not to mother her child.

Signe Fourmy on Not Even Past:
Driven Toward Madness: The Fugitive Slave Margaret Garner and Tragedy on the Ohio by Nikki M. Taylor

Sean Killen
“South Asians and the Creation of International Legal Order, c. 1850-c. 1920: Global Political Thought and Imperial Legal Politics”

This dissertation argues that South Asians used international legal discourse both for ideological disputation and to mount political challenges to the domination and subjugation that accompanied British imperial rule between roughly 1850 and 1920. South Asians instigated political and legal disputes in India and Britain, throughout the empire, and overseas, and gained promises and partial concessions to Indian opinions and demands that limited British options in imperial and international relations. In so doing, they compelled the British state to alter the ideology, the policies, and the practices of the state, in India and in its relations with other states both within and outside the empire. Britain’s power, ultimately, meant that South Asians’ argumentation and actions shaped the contours of global order after the First World War….Traditional histories of international law argue that international law originated in Europe and regulated European states’ relations until colonized states were granted international legal recognition at the time of decolonization. Recent revisionist scholarship argues that the existence and experience of empire and colonial rule shaped the development of international law and global order throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. This dissertation approaches empire in a way that emphasizes the global exchange of ideas and the active connections between colonizers and the colonized. Elite, English-speaking South Asians acted as cultural translators or intermediaries. They engaged in debates as public intellectuals, and they carved out spaces for themselves in the social and political communities that created public opinion. Consequently, South Asians’ ideas about relations among different peoples and between states, and South Asians’ mobilization of these ideas throughout the empire and overseas to make political claims about the obligations of the imperial state and the rights of imperial subjects shaped ideas about global order and the structure of international legal relations.

Jimena Perry, Teaching Instructor, East Carolina University
“Trying to Remember: Museums, Exhibitions, and Memories of Violence in Colombia, 2000-2014”

The Center for Memory, Peace, and Reconciliation, Bogotá, Colombia.

Since the turn of the century, not only museum professionals but grassroots community leaders have undertaken the challenge of memorializing the Colombian armed conflict of the 1980s to the early 2000s. In an attempt to confront the horrors of the massacres, forced displacement, bombings, and disappearances, museums and exhibitions have become one of the tools used to represent and remember the brutalities endured. To demonstrate how historical memories are informed by cultural diversity, my dissertation examines how Colombians remember the brutalities committed by the Army, guerrillas, and paramilitaries during the countryʼs internal war.  The chapters of this work delve into four case studies. The first highlights the selections of what not to remember and represent at the National Museum of the country.  The second focuses on the well-received memories at the same institution by examining a display made to commemorate the assassination of a demobilized guerrilla fighter. The third discusses how a rural marginal community decided to vividly remember the attacks they experienced by creating a display hall to aid in their collective and individual healing. Lastly, the fourth, also about a rural peripheric community, discusses their particular way of remembering, which emphasizes their peasant oral traditions through a traveling venue. Bringing violence, memory, and museum studies together, my work contributes to our understanding of how social groups severely impacted by atrocities recreate and remember their violent experiences. In addition, my case studies exemplify why it is necessary to hear the multiple voices of conflict survivors, especially in a country with a long history of violence like Colombia. Drawing on displays, newspapers, interviews, catalogs, and oral histories, I study how museums and exhibitions in Colombia become politically active subjects in the acts of reflection and mourning, and how they foster new relationships between the state and society. My work also analyzes museums and displays as arbiters of social memory. It asks how representations of violence serve in processes of transitional justice and promotion of human rights for societies that have been racked by decades of violence.

Jimena Perry on Not Even Past:
When Answers Are Not Enough: The U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum
More Than Archives: Dealing with Unfinished History
Too Much Inclusion? Museo Casa de la Memoria, Medellin, Colombia
Time to Remember: Violence in Museums and Memory, 2000-2014
My Cocaine Museum by Michael Taussig
History Museums: The Center for Memory, Peace, and Reconciliation, Bogatá, Colombia
History Museums: The Hall of Never Again

Christina Villareal, Assistant Professor, Dept. of History, The University of Texas at El Paso
“Resisting Colonial Subjugation: The Search for Refuge in the Texas-Louisiana Borderlands, 1714-1803”

This dissertation is a history of the Spanish borderlands from the perspectives of subjugated people in the Gulf Coast. Based on colonial, military, and civil manuscript sources from archives in the United States, Mexico, Spain, and France, it traces the physical movement of Native Americans, soldiers, and African and indigenous slaves who fled conscription, reduction to Catholic missions, or enslavement in the Texas-Louisiana borderlands of the eighteenth century. It reconstructs geographies of resistance to understand how challenges to colonial oppression shaped imperial territory and created alternative spaces for asylum. While the overarching focus of the dissertation is political space-making at the ground-level, the pivotal change occasioned by the Treaty of Paris (1763) serves as the central arc of the dissertation. The treaty, in which Spain acquired Louisiana from France, signified a major imperial transformation of the Gulf Coast. Initiated “from above,” this geopolitical transition expanded the Spanish borderlands over former French territory and altered the locations where Native Americans, soldiers, and enslaved people could find or avoid colonial oppression.

Christina Villareal on Not Even Past
The War on Drugs: How the US and Mexico Jointly Created the Mexican Drug War by Carmen Boullusa and Mike Wallace

Andrew Weiss
“The Virgin and The Pri: Guadalupanismo And Political Governance In Mexico, 1945-1979”

This dissertation explores the dynamic relationship between Catholicism and political governance in Mexico from 1945 until 1979 through the lens of Guadalupanismo. Guadalupanismo (devotion to the Virgin of Guadalupe) is a unifying nationalistic force in Mexico. After 1940, Church and state collaborated to promote the Virgin of Guadalupe as a nationalist emblem following decades of divisive state-led religious persecution. Mexico, however, remained officially anticlerical sociopolitical territory. I analyze flashpoints of Guadalupan nationalism to reveal the history of Mexican Church-state relations and Catholic religiosity. These episodes are: the 1945 fiftieth anniversary of the 1895 coronation of the Virgin of Guadalupe; U.S. President John F. Kennedy’s 1962 visit to the Basilica of Guadalupe; the construction of the New Basilica in the 1970s (inaugurated in 1976); and Pope John Paul II’s trip to Mexico and the Basilica in 1979. Each of these occasions elicited great popular enthusiasm and participation in public ritual. And each brought politicians in contact with the third rail in Mexican politics: religion. The essential value of the Virgin of Guadalupe, as I show, is that as both a Catholic and a nationalistic icon, she represented an ideal symbolic terrain for the renegotiation and calibration of Church-state relations under PRI rule. I follow these Guadalupan episodes to track the history of Guadalupanismo and interpret the changing Church-state relationship at different junctures in the course of the single-party priísta regime. These junctures (1945, 1962, 1976, and 1979) are relevant because they are representative of classical and degenerative phases of priísmo (the ideology of the ruling party [PRI] that governed Mexico from 1929 until 2000) and cover the episcopates of three major figures who ran the Archdiocese of Mexico for over sixty years. The Church-state covenant was renegotiated over time as seen by the Guadalupan episodes I analyze.

Andrew Weiss on Not Even Past
Plaza of Sacrifices: Gender, Power, and Terror in 1968 Mexico by Elaine Carey

Pictured above (Clockwise from top center): Sandy Chang, Andrew Weiss, Deirdre Lannon, Jimena Perry, Celeste Ward Gventer, Christina Villareal, Itay Eisinger.
Not pictured: Signe Fourmy, Lauren Henley, Sean Killen, Holly McCarthy, Carl Forsberg,

Historians on Marriage and Sexuality in the United States

People celebrate the Obergefell vs Hodges decision in front of the Supreme Court in 2015 (Ted Eytan, via Flickr)

by Alexander Taft

In June 2015, by a vote of 5 to 4, the Supreme Court of the United States resolved decades of debate by declaring marriage a fundamental right regardless of sexual orientation. The Obergefell v. Hodges decision changed the landscape of American marriage law, but what was this landscape in the first place? Two historians of marriage and sexuality in the United States have spent decades taking on that very question. Nancy Cott and George Chauncey have both participated in recent history as expert witnesses, amicus curiae (friend of the court) brief writers, and eminent scholars analyzing marriage and homosexuality. They show us how incorrect we often are when we think of these histories in the United States. These historians have made history a friend to the court as much as any lobbyist or interest group.

Nancy Cott’s Public Vows: A History of Marriage and the Nation lays out centuries of marriage law in the United States. Far from the moral absolute marked by religious teachings that many might assume marriage was, it is a complicated and shifting concept in the history of the Western world. Cott points out that marriage has a national concern that secular governments legislate in order to create the best “civic units” out of the family. Society became concerned with civic character and then tried to improve these norms by engineering a certain type of family. The common practice of unofficial divorce and separation led to a formal legal process for divorces just as much as the legal definition led to formal divorces. We are accustomed to thinking of these everyday things as defined from above, yet our community practices often find their way into law as often as the other way around.

The history of marriage in the United States certainly does not have the kind of unchanging moral character that many opponents to marriage equality claim. “Traditional” families are constantly changing. Two centuries ago, the most important people in deciding a match may well have been the community in which the couple lived. Small rural towns had a deep interest and broad powers in marital arrangements. Cott’s book is full of such examples of unofficial activities that reflected community interests, not the interests of the individuals involved. Marriage today is much more of an individual choice based on one’s own expectations from life, even if still affected by an idea of “normalcy” and pressures to fit into a family, a faith, or some other kind of community. Ultimately, the majority of Americans are free to marry outside of their “tribe,” because whatever social costs that are associated are considerably lower.  Similarly, marriage was limited to “consenting” and “free” individuals. This meant that slaves were barred from this institution while also condemned as immoral for engaging in extramarital intercourse; a key aspect of reconstruction was the construction of ex-slave marriage. If marriage is an ever-changing reality, why shouldn’t the court consider homosexuals simply another kind of marriage?

Marriage may be a concept in flux, but what about homosexuality? Today we identify people with their sexual orientation, but was that the case in the past? Many assume that throughout history, these communities were wholly underground — persecuted and kept hidden by families ashamed of their “perverse” siblings. But George Chauncey, along with a wide field of historians, have helped us to reconsider. Rather than being a gay or a lesbian, often individuals engaged in various kinds of sexual behaviors. In fact, Chauncey’s ground-breaking book, Gay New York: Gender, Urban Culture, and the Making of the Gay Male World, 1890-1940, outlined how urban men who participated in homosexual behaviors often considered themselves to be “normal,” that is, not defined by their same-sex intercourse, as long as they played the “active” role in intercourse. Those men engaging in the “passive” role in intercourse were seen from the outside as primarily a public nuisance on par with prostitution (which they often engaged in). The homosexual subculture of turn-of-the-century New York was visible and defined by specific kinds of sexual activities, not necessarily nature-born identities. In fact, the words we use today, such as “gay,” “lesbian,” and likely even “homosexual” would not have been known by the vast majority of people.

Twelve years before Obergefell, the Supreme Court laid the groundwork for this legal breakthrough. The June 2003 case, Lawrence v. Texas, challenged and then overturned what were commonly known as “sodomy laws” that declared sodomy illegal. Much of the debate surrounding these laws considered them to be expressions of long-standing morals; an accepted societal conclusion that homosexuality itself was illegal. However, Chauncey’s amicus curiae brief (with input from a number of historians) decimated this belief by pointing out that “sodomy” itself was a dubious term that had shifted throughout history. He pointed out for example that famed thirteenth-century theologian Thomas Aquinas considered every sexual act that was not direct penetrative vaginal sex to be sodomy. He also explained that the history of sexuality shows that these “morals” were recent inventions and historically changeable. His brief was specifically quoted by Justice Anthony Kennedy, the swing vote, whose opinion overturned decades of legal persecution.

Historians have much to teach, but not only to students. Society is improved by their scholarship, often because our collective memories are too short and our ability to see past our biases and preconceptions is often lacking.

Further Reading:

George Chauncey, Gay New York: Gender, Urban Culture, and the Making of the Gay Male World, 1890-1940 (1995)

George, Chauncey, “What Gay Studies Taught the Courts: The Historians’ Amicus Brief in Lawrence v. Texas,” in GLQ 10, 3 (2004): 509-538.

Nancy Cott, Public Vows: A History of Marriage and the Nation (2002)

You may also like:

Loving v. Virginia after 50 years
The Lavender Scare: The Cold War Persecution of Gays and Lesbians in the Federal Government reviewed by Joseph Parrott
Daina Ramey Berry on Slavery, Work, and Sexuality

 

IHS Roundtable – Loving v. Virginia After 50 Years

Movie poster for the movie Loving

On March 23, 2017, the Institute for Historical Studies sponsored a roundtable on the landmark Supreme Court decision that struck down laws banning inter-racial marriage. Director of HIS, Seth Garfield, introduced the three panelists, who included Jacqueline Jones, Chair of the UT Austin History Department and well known to readers of Not Even Past, Kevin Noble Maillard, Professor of Law at Syracuse University and co-editor of Loving v. Virginia in a Post-Racial World: Rethinking Race, Sex, and Marriage, and Jeff Nichols, the director and screen writer of Loving, the 2016 feature film devoted to telling the story of Richard and Mildred Loving and their road to the Surpeme Court.

You can listen to an audio of the roundtable here. A transcript appears below.

Transcription by Rebecca Johnston, Henry Wiencek, and Maria Hammack.


GARFIELD:
On behalf of the Institute for Historical Studies it is my pleasure to welcome you this afternoon to our panel commemorating the fiftieth anniversary the Loving v. Virginia decision. This landmark decision struck down laws banning interracial marriage as a violation of the Equal Protection Clause of the 14th amendment. At the time so-called anti-miscegenation laws were on the books in 16 southern states including Texas. Many years ago sociologist C. Wright Mills observed that “No social study that does not come back to the problems of biography, of history, and of their intersections within a society has completed its intellectual journey.”  The story of Mildred and Richard Loving and the watershed case that bears their name in many ways epitomizes such intersections. A story of love, on one hand, so tender, so private, and so ordinary, and on the other hand to persecuted, so public, and so extraordinary, as the couples’ marriage became engulfed by and deepened the broader political struggles for Civil Rights and racial equality in the South.  So today, fifty years after the Loving decision, we’re pleased to have an interdisciplinary panel composed of an historian, a legal scholar, and a filmmaker, to examine the historical origins of said anti-miscegenation laws in the United States, the battles to overturn them and the paths and challenges to greater colorblindness and marriage equality in the U.S.

Black and white image of Richard and Mildred Loving
Richard and Mildred Loving (via Wikimedia Commons).

GARFIELD: Our first panelist is Dr. Jacqueline Jones, Chair of the History Department and Walter Prescott Webb Chair in History and Ideas/Mastin Gentry White Professor of Southern History at UT Austin. Professor Jones is the author of ten books, including A Dreadful Deceit: The Myth of Race from the Colonial Era to Obama’s America, published in 2013, which was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. She’s also the author of Labor of Love, Labor of Sorrow: Black Women, Work and the Family from Slavery to the Present, which was also a finalist for the Pulitzer, and won the Bancroft Prize. Her current project is a full-length biography of Lucy Parsons, orator and labor agitator, who was born to an enslaved woman in Virginia in 1851. Professor Jones has won numerous grants and awards, including a MacArthur Fellowship. Please join me in welcoming Dr. Jacqueline Jones.

Headshot of Professor Jacqueline Jones

JONES: Thanks for the introduction, Seth. It’s really a pleasure to be here today, especially with my fellow panelists, Professor Maillard and Mr. Nichols, both of whom have done so much to advance our understanding of and appreciation for the Loving v. the State of Virginia decision: Professor Maillard through his wide-ranging book, Loving v. Virginia in a Post-Racial World, and Mr. Nichols, through the beautiful, compelling movie, Loving.

My first awareness of laws against intermarriage stems from my days as a high school student in Delaware, when I learned that my French teacher, my junior year, was not allowed to live with his wife in the state of Delaware. They lived in Pennsylvania just across the line instead. So among those sixteen southern states that banned interracial marriage through the 1960s was the State of Delaware. I grew up in a rigidly segregated little town of 500 people. There were four churches in this little town – two black, two white, three Methodist, one Presbyterian. This was a small town between Newark and Bloomington, Delaware. And if I’d learned anything from that experience, it was how presumably well-meaning white people could accommodate themselves to – acquiesce in – forms of discrimination such as anti-miscegenation laws, so-called. My parents and my extended family saw this as customary, as a matter of tradition, something that really did not affect them or other churchgoers at this time. So a reminder, here, as we look back to 1967 and wonder how people could so persecute a couple for their relationship, we have to remember how many people were indifferent, and some of course were actively outraged.

Black and white image of a white sign that says in black letters "We want white tenants in our white community" from 1942
White tenants seeking to prevent blacks from moving into the Sojourner Truth housing project in Detroit, 1942 (via Wikimedia Commons).

By way of introduction, I would just like to restate what Seth already mentioned in his introduction – the obvious central paradox that informs our understanding of the institution of marriage, that it is built on the most private, intimate of human relationships, and yet it is not only highly public, but also highly politicized. Specifically in the South, but not only in the South, the states’ regulation of interracial marriage has been a means to further and preserve white supremacy.

I’d like to very briefly discuss four themes today. First of all, I want to distinguish between interracial sex and interracial marriage. They are related, but they’re not the same thing. Secondly, I want to remind us to remain alert to the hypocrisy and dissembling. We’ll hear much about white men who objected to race mixing and miscegenation, but that is only partially true. Let’s see what they do and not just what they say. Certainly, there were distinct limits to their outrage. Third, the subject of interracial marriage has a history. We can compare, for instance, the Antebellum period in American history to the period after the Civil War and see how attitudes towards relationships, especially marriages between white men and black women, changed over time. And finally, I want to suggest that interracial marriage is a complicated question, revealing of definitions of family, race, power, and citizenship.

Those of you who know me and know my work know that I object to the word “race” for its imprecision, but mainly because it doesn’t really exist. It’s a fiction. Racial ideologies of course are very powerful, and have had a pernicious influence on this country. But that’s very different from the idea of race, which presupposes a hierarchy of racial groups and the notion itself of course seeks to categorize people into certain groups. I’ll be using the term race, though, even though I don’t think it really exists, except as an ideology, a political strategy. And the strategy here is among people who seem to construct hierarchies of power based on lineage and gender, and skin, color, and class.

So, here, at the beginning of my first point, which is distinguishing between interracial sex and interracial marriage, let’s go back to the 17th-century Chesapeake, Maryland and Virginia, those colonies, and reflect on the reality of colonial settlements, which had too much land and too few workers. We see, early in the century, masters of indentured servants, white and black, impregnating their women servants in order to extent those servants’ indentures. That is, in order to extend their time of service. It was illegal for a young woman who was a servant to become pregnant. She could be forced to serve more than the customary seven years if she did become pregnant. So what happened was officials in the Chesapeake began to pass laws saying that if an indentured servant became pregnant, her time would be given or sold to another master. That was to discourage masters from impregnating their servants and making them spend longer on their indentures.

Black and white photograph of slaves working on a plantation, circa 1862–1863
Slaves working on a plantation, circa 1862–1863 (via Wikimedia Commons).

Also during this period we find a very distinct development, and that is the colonies decide that legal status should flow from the mother’s status, and not from the father’s status. That was primarily because slave owners, again, were impregnating enslaved women. As a result, regardless of the father’s status, regardless of the physical appearance of the children, the children were, of course, legally enslaved. And I think this fact shows the “why?” of race. People often talk about race-based slavery. But in fact, children with one white parent or one black parent were of neither race. It’s very difficult to speak in racial terms of children whose parents are mixed. But in any case, we do find, throughout the Antebellum South, by the late Antebellum period, clear evidence that many children of slave owners have become enslaved, because they are the offspring of white men physically and sexually abusing enslaved women.

The term miscegenation was actually coined during the American Civil War, and the aim here of laws against miscegenation was to uphold the authority of well-to-do white men who sought to control land, labor, and inheritances to the detriment of white women. And also the detriment of black and Native American men and women. Before the Civil War, black-white marriages were not encouraged, certainly, but they were in many cases tolerated, because they didn’t threaten the racial hierarchies embedded in the institution of slavery. But beginning in the 1860s and then through the 1960s, the American legal code enshrined the idea that interracial marriage was unnatural. In other words, once slavery was destroyed, local and state officials felt they had to carefully monitor not just interracial marriage, but also interracial sex, mainly between black men and white women. We see in the 1890s, when the Populist Party is beginning to make a strong pitch for the common interests among black and white sharecroppers and tenants, we see during this period the demonization of black men, the image of the black man as rapist, the white woman as victim. This, as Ida B. Wells-Barnett and other anti-lynching activists pointed out, was a total fiction. And yet, it was an image that was meant to drive a wedge between landless black and white tillers of the soil who otherwise would’ve understood that they had much in common.

Color-coded map of the United States that showed which states had laws against inter-racial marriage until Loving v. Virginia in 1967
States in red on this map still had laws against inter-racial marriage until Loving v. Virginia in 1967 (via Wikimedia Commons).

I want just for a moment, though, to detour to a marriage that I know a little bit about, and that is between a formerly enslaved woman and a white man. I just finished a biography of Lucy Parsons, who was born to an enslaved woman in Virginia in 1851 and forcibly removed with the rest of her master’s plantation to Texas in 1863, in the middle of the Civil War. After freedom, she and her family moved to Waco, where she met a young white man named Albert Parsons. Albert Parsons later became famous for his role in the Haymarket affair. He was hanged in 1887. In any case, Lucy and Albert Parsons were able to marry in Texas in 1872. And it’s interesting because there was a very small window of opportunity for them to do so. After the war, Southern whites were interpreting marriage laws to mean that black people could marry among themselves for the first time legally, but that they could not marry white people. In 1872, and for a few months in 1873, the Republican Party held sway in the State of Texas. Albert Parsons, who was a Republican operative, took advantage of that window of opportunity. He and Lucy got married; I think probably the mayor of Waco presided over their marriage. But by the next year, the Democrats had regained control of the state again, and the couple had to move to Chicago, where they lived the rest of their lives. She lived until 1942. They lived in a German immigrant community in Chicago, which seemed to accept them for who they were.

Bans on interracial marriage obviously have had implications for family relations. White kin have been determined to withhold from Indian, Native American, African American, and Asian would-be wives’ land, inheritance, and other resources from their marriage with white men. And this was, of course, as Professor Maillard has pointed out in his book, not just a black-white issue, but an issue related to a whole host of other groups defined as non-white. The point here is that a white man’s marriage to a black [woman], of course, implicitly implied a redistribution of land and resources if he died before she did. And that, of course, was something that white supremacists could not abide. Extralegal interracial families were common throughout the South after the Civil War. I would think that, had Richard Loving been wealthy, and had he not married Mildred Jeter, Caroline County officials would have left the couple alone. So we see a couple of issues there – the arrogance of white men of means in exploiting black women, and we also see the idea that marriage here really changes the dynamic, because it does involve control over land and inheritances.

So, the theme of hypocrisy. In the film, the county sheriff – I think it’s the sheriff, i’m not sure – says that that robins and sparrows were made separate by god, and that they should never be joined together. The judge, the local judge in the case, Bazile, rails against race mixing as if there is a real principle here at stake. We know, though, slave owners who raped enslaved women – that was a logical component of the slave system. By doing so and producing children, these white men enhanced their labor forces. Yes, they did enslave their own children. In the process, they also demeaned and humiliated black men, and they held the enslaved community in subjection. Mary Boykin Chesnut, the well-to-do wife of a South Carolina politician, said famously: “White women on the plantation seemed to know where the white children on other plantations came from, but the ones on their own plantation, they think dropped from the sky.”

Black and white image of a family of slaves in Georgia, circa 1850
Family of slaves in Georgia, circa 1850 (via Wikimedia Commons).

So after the Civil War, black men’s sexual relations with white women became a piece with agitation for civil rights. Poor women who married black men were deemed immoral and promiscuous. But getting back to this hypocrisy about a time where segregation was certainly the law of a particular region, if not the land, consider the case of Strom Thurmond, who loudly denounced integration. If you’ll recall, Strom Thurmond, born in 1902 in South Carolina, was a U.S. senator for 48 years from that state. He ran on the Dixiecrat ticket in 1948, ran for president. In 1964, he became a Republican because of his opposition to the 1964 Civil Rights Act, outlawing discrimination in housing and in jobs. That year – he had declared, actually, in 1948, when he ran for president: “All the laws of Washington and all the bayonets of the army cannot force the negro into our homes, into our schools, our churches and our places of recreation and amusement.” Well, note that many black women were already going into white homes every day to work as domestic servants, and as laundresses and as cooks. That was not the purpose of segregation, to keep black women from serving white households. It was to humiliate black people in public and keep them in separate parks or away from parks, in separate parts of the movie theater, and so forth. In 1925, Strom Thurmond raped a domestic servant in his house, 16-year-old domestic Carrie Butler. His daughter Essie Mae Washington and Thurmond’s family kept this secret until his death in 2003. Miscegenation laws were finally taken off the books in South Carolina in 1998 and in Alabama in 2000.

But what I wanted to juxtapose here was Thurmond, with his strident arguments against integration, when every day this vulnerable young woman was coming into his home, the home of his parents, and he certainly had no compunction about sexually abusing her. The Lovings, as people will recall, were sentenced to one year in prison for violating Virginia’s Racial Integrity Act of 1924. That year, I think, has a broader context. Obviously, it was a time when the United States was limiting the immigrants who could come into this country to those from European nations. It was a time of scientific racism. And under the Virginia law, members of so-called non-white races could marry each other, but they could not marry white people. So again, the aim here was to uphold white supremacy and not the separation of the races per se.

Photograph of Senator Thurmond on his 100th birthday, shortly before his retirement from the US Senate
Senator Thurmond on his 100th birthday, shortly before his retirement from the US Senate (via Wikimedia Commons).

The relationship between marriage and power – this is clear, I think. And again, we come back to the fact that when Richard Loving did predecease his wife, his assets went to her. They, in other words, went presumably to her extended family within a black community. Their children were called unnatural and bastards, and again, think of the hypocrisy here. The United States has ample evidence that prohibitions against race mixing have not been adhered to at all. What is race – the Loving children, Donald, Sydney, and Peggy, were labeled black. But the mixed heritage here – Mildred Jeter was a descendant of Native Americans as well as of people of African descent – the mixed heritage revealed how foolish these very rigid, strict classifications were. So marriage is an integral component of American citizenship. It confirms not only rights, but also respect on a couple.

In conclusion, I just want to say that beginning in the British North American colonies and stretching into our own time, state-based efforts to control or prohibit interracial marriage and interracial sex, all the while sanctioning the abuse of black and other minority women – that’s a long and sordid history. Indeed, today we see vocal resistance to gay marriage among people who, like their Southern white forebearers before them, invoke god to argue that same-sex relationships, and not just marriage, are sinful. Obviously, we cannot congratulate ourselves that the Loving decision of 1967 settled this question once and for all. Though we can acknowledge that it was a long past due, if not entirely successful effort, to curtail state power in criminalizing intimate relationships in general, and marriage in particular, between consenting adults. Thank you.

GARFIELD: Thank you. Our next speaker is Dr. Kevin Noble Maillard. He is Professor of Law at Syracuse University. Professor Maillard is a co-editor of Loving v. Virginia in a Post-Racial World: Rethinking Race, Sex, and Marriage, published by Cambridge University Press in 2012. Katherine M. Frank, Professor of Law at Columbia Law School, noted that the edited volume “contains some of the most thoughtful, and original essays on race, family, nation and law.” Originally from Oklahoma, he is a member of the Seminole Nation, Mekusukey Band. He received his B.A. in Public Policy from Duke University, his J.D. from Penn Law School, and his Ph.D. in political philosophy from the University of Michigan. Dr. Maillard is a frequent commentator on race in the United States. He’s written for The Atlantic and provides on-air legal commentary to MSNBC, and is a contributing editor to The New York Times. We’re so pleased he could join us today coming in from New York. Please welcome Professor Maillard.

Headshot of Professor Kevin Noble Maillard, Professor of Law at Syracuse University

MAILLARD: Thanks for coming, I’m glad to be in such esteemed company here in Texas. This is really great and the weather of course is just really welcome for me coming from New York where there’s still snow on the ground.

I first became interested in this topic just by being born. My dad is West Indian, his grandparents came over from St. Maarten in the 1800s. My mother is from Seminole Nation of Oklahoma and that’s where I grew up. And so, I also went to high school in Tulsa, OK, where I had these parents with this background and then I went to an all-white high school so I’ve always kind of suffered being the only one of whatever it is in all of my institutions.

So, here’s what I find so interesting about licenses. We have to have a lot of licenses, do a lot of things. We need a license to drive. We need a license to in Texas to hunt, to own a gun. We need a license to do a lot of things. We also need a license traditionally to have sex. That’s what marriage is. When I tell this to my students they kind of look at me like “we don’t have to have a license.” But when the state is recognizing that relationship and according benefits, protections and privileges because of that relationship then the license to have sex becomes something that is worthy of holding and it becomes a property interest where we can exclude other people and we can have expectations on what we desire to get out of the marriage. We have this interest in marriage where we expect things to come from it. So, when we see these wars over what marriage means over who can and cannot get married these are just culture wars with marriage there that’s in the middle. That thing that academics on college campuses would call a liminal space. Normal people might call it a flashpoint. Other people on the street might just call it a really important issue. For marriage itself, it is a legal relationship but it’s not about love that much. Love is a new concept in the issue of marriage.

Black and white photograph of a protest against integration in Little Rock, Arkansas
Protest against integration, Little Rock, AK (Wikimedia Commons).

So, I study legal history and when we think about marriage this is an exchange of property. As Professor Jones was saying, we are transferring property from white men to other people. Would they have looked at the Lovings differently had Richard Loving been a rich guy? If he had a lot of property to give a way? If he had a lot of property to transmit at his death? Think of marriage also as a way of classifying people. Think of when you go to the doctor’s office and every time you go there’s some status that you have to put on. What do they want to know? Your address, your phone number, your next of kin, that kind of information. But they always want to know whether you’re married or not. That’s interesting, right? They want to know if you’re married or not and there are only four choices: single, married, widowed, divorced. Everyone else is just dead to the world. It doesn’t say if you’re dating, if you’re cohabiting, there’s no “it’s complicated” like they would have on Facebook. There are all these rigid statuses because the state can only see the red light or the green light, there’s nothing that’s in between. So, for marriage, it places people into pegs and society we can look at these people and say “are they joined? Are they committed? Are they not committed?”

So, from my own person life, I’ve been studying marriage and interracialism my entire career. I’m not married but I have my partner and we have kids together and then people then always want to know what our status is and I’m always really annoyingly academic and political about it. But then it’s the same thing as being married but I’ve always looked at marriage as a way to disenfranchise black people or differently as a way for the state to back away from people because once people are married the state expects them to take care of themselves. We could look at marriage as a way of privatizing welfare. In my home state of Oklahoma there are marriage promotion campaigns. “Why don’t we have these people all get married?” In one of the debates between Romney and Obama—this was the famous “binders full of women” debate—Romney said, well “why don’t we just have all these people get married” as if David’s Bridal is going to solve all our social pathologies.

We expect the state to rely on marriage as a way of saying: “once these people are married, they’ll take care of each other, they’ll be dual income or we hold that spouse liable for all that other person’s debts, their obligations, their responsibilities to society.” So, marriage itself is this golden circle of protection, of privileges, of expectations that has been used traditionally as relationship to either bring black people in but more so to exclude people of color from the franchise, to exclude people of color from full citizenship by saying “if we have these people who were once enslaved, let’s have them get married because then now all of these poor people can take care of each other, we no longer have any obligation toward these people.”

What about these people of different races that might want to marry? Now there will be a transfer of wealth, an intermingling of financial and property interests between these groups and there will no longer be any rigid boundaries between the different races and we will not be able to tell where one stops and the other starts. So, marriage is a function of the police power. It locates people within a society, it determines their status; it tells the state whether we can recognize these people as actually being joined to one another or not.

A marble plaque at 42 Rutland Gate in London, UK for Sir Francis Galton, the founder of eugenics
Marble plaque at 42 Rutland Gate, London (via Wikimedia Commons).

Here’s where it ends up being a legal issue about prohibitions and exclusions for marriage: Eugenics. Eugenics would be the science of human breeding. This was very popular in the early 20th-century. Eugenics— “we have the right people marry each other.” Without this policing of these people marrying each other, then our society might devolve. If we have careful examination of the appropriate people to marry, then our society will be stronger. What is this sounding like? At the forefront of this scholarship of Eugenics was a man by the name of Francis Galton who was English and was a half cousin of Charles Darwin and he coined the term Eugenics in 1883 as “the science of improvement of the human germplasm through better breeding.” Eugenicists vociferously argued that the white race as a superior group remained strong only when pure. They would have studies; there would be doctors that would back up these studies—not really good doctors; there were scholars that would write about this; there were state actors who would support this. What does this sound like? Fake science! It’s like history repeats itself over and over.

“A people that fails to preserve the purity of its racial blood, thereby destroys the unity of the soul of the nation and all its manifestations.” Who said that? Adolf Hitler. Adolf Hitler was part of the conversation of Virginia’s Racial Integrity Act. The architects of that Integrity Act were three men by the name of Walter Plecker, Earnest Sevier Cox and John Powell. They led a campaign of racial politics in the state which classified miscegenation as “a breach in the dyke” to be stopped. They insisted on the legitimacy of Eugenics, which they defined as the science of improving stock, whether human or animal. The trio presented a racial apocalypse attributed to imprudent choices of sexual partners. Eugenics minded propaganda published by the Virginia Bureau of Vital Statistics warned young men and women considering marriage—the greatest and most important of human relations—and also lawmakers who were responsible for the future of the state and welfare of the race.

A photograph of a historical marker in North Carolina for the state's Eugenics Board
Historical Marker in North Carolina (via Wikimedia Commons).

By presenting this future of the white race as dependent on individual, personal choice— “when you walk out on the street today, you’re making associations with different people, you might marry that person, you might have a child with that person”—the personal literally is political. These Virginians attempted to ignite a race panic that would soon be ingrained in law.

“The law is the witness and external deposit of our moral life.” this is written by Oliver Wendell Holmes, Supreme Court Justice, in the Harvard Law Review in 1897. This statement conceptualizes law as a system of beliefs, a reflection of what our society holds most valuable—what it holds to be proper, how we should associate, who we should be close to. These are the components of the Racial Integrity Act—what our society deems to be most important. First, the act required all citizens within the state born after June 14, 1912 to register their racial composition with the Bureau of Vital Statistics, with Walter Plecker as director.

Secondly, the race registration certificates determined a valid marriage, thus preventing any non-whites from illegally marrying whites. Thirdly, the act defined a white person as one whose blood is entirely white, having no known demonstrable or ascertainable mixture of blood of another race, which they had to amend because some of the people that were white in the state of Virginia that thought of themselves as white that were part of the state legislature would suddenly not be counted as white anymore, this would have affected about 16 members of the legislature. So, they put a little bit of an exception in there to make room for people who would proudly call themselves descendants of Pocahontas. So, people who in Virginia would like to say “I’m from the first families of Virginia, the oldest families of Virginia” most of those people could trace their ancestry back to a non-white Disney princess known as Pocahontas—they wouldn’t be able to do that anymore. These people who wanted to claim that minuscule ancestry were no longer be declared white even if it was 1/156th part Native. These people would no longer be part of the white franchise in the state of Virginia.

We end up with Loving v. Virginia, where the Lovings are challenging this Racial Integrity Act of 1924 that was the intellectual commerce of Nazi Germany. What is a white person? the state invokes equal protection. they’re saying that everyone is being treated equally by this racial integrity act, because the law would be applied equally to whites and non-whites. Just like with same sex marriage, the laws banning same sex marriage would apply equally of people of the same sex who wanted to marry and other people—it didn’t single out anyone, these different state laws would say, this is just the way the law is.

The state also said that the court should defer to the wisdom of the state legislature. For me as a family law professor, this is usually the explanation of courts when they don’t really know what else to say—and especially when the claim they’re making is generally unconstitutional: “let’s leave it up to a popular vote.” Here’s what the supreme court said in Loving v. Virginia: “there is patently no overriding purpose independent of invidious racial discrimination which would justify this classification.” So, we have two constitutional issues in the 14th amendment that are at play here: one would be an equality issue—black people, native people, Asians, Latinos would all be able to marry each other in this Racial Integrity Act. why? Because the Racial Integrity Act was only about white racial purity. So, a family like mine, they’d say “marry each other all you want, we don’t care about blacks and natives. all we care about is if there is a white person involved.” That is what racial integrity means.

Black and white photograph of President Johnson signing the Civil Rights Act of 1964
President Johnson signs the Civil Rights Act of 1964 (via Wikimedia Commons).

There is also the liberty issue. The fundamental substantive due process issue which is just a legal way of saying this is a fundamental right for people to have the choice of who they want to marry. The state should not be involved in that decision. Why should we defer to the state legislature when it comes to fundamental rights? Would any restrictions on marriage be constitutional? You would have someone in most recent history like Antonin Scalia, Supreme Court Justice, who would have said “do all of these laws mean the end of all morals legislation? If we allow for the striking down of sodomy laws, does this mean that one day bestiality will become legal? Everyone can go and marry their mothers? We can have marriages with plants and animals? We can marry our dog? We have to have some line somewhere. We cannot decide this based on an idea of dignity—that’s not an appropriate road. What we do have to think about is tradition, this is the way that states have always looked at marriage, which has not always given every single autonomy the ability to make that personal choice to the individual actors.”

Let’s go a little ahead to today with marriage equality. Obergefell v. Hodges most recently deemed that marriage between same sex partners is now legal across the land. It’s like an opinion justice Kennedy was just waiting to write: the first thing he cited was Loving. Couldn’t even get off the first page without mentioning Loving v. Virginia. Why? Because there are the same constitutional ideals of equality—are similarly situated people being treated the same? —and we also have the fundamental rights issue of marriage, making these private decisions about who they want to spend their life with and have it recognized by the state. These people they would transpose these same ideals from Loving to the same sex marriage context, so then when we have Justice Kennedy writing this opinion it’s like the first thing that he can say is this is exactly like Loving. Then he goes off into this long soliloquy about “if people cannot get married then they will be lonely forever and we don’t want people to get lonely and we want children to be protected by their parents, we want to have dignity for all these different groups.”

Image of crowds outside the Supreme Court of the United States the day the court ended marriage discrimination
Supreme Court of the United States ends marriage discrimination (via Wikimedia Commons).

The reasons why marriage is a fundamental right become more clear and compelling from a full awareness and understanding of the hurt that results from laws banning interracial unions, and then also same sex unions. So when Scalia and Thomas say “let’s rely on state legislatures for these laws, we do not need to engineer from the bench, we do not want to be judicial activists,” I always say to my students: are we part of social engineering already? Are we the results of this? If those laws had not been in place now, would there be more people in the United States that would openly declare themselves to be gay, lesbian, transgender, bisexual? Would there be more people in the United States that would declare themselves to be multi-racial? Would there be more opportunities for people to be multi-racial? Because then when you look around the room maybe about 1/10 people might be of 2 different races. Is that a personal choice that someone was making, that someone’s grandfather was making, that someone’s grandmother was making? Yet here we are today still with a majority of people being of one race. Had those distinctions not been made so apparent and so illegal would we have a different nation now? Would we look like Hawaii? Would we would look like Mexico? Would we look like Brazil?

Can we ask what the role of law is in our everyday lives and the decisions that other people will make in our past that brought us here—how does that affect the way that we represent ourselves, and the way we see our current world? As I started off saying, the law is the witness and external deposit of our moral life, written by Oliver Wendell Holmes. We could say that interracial love is complicated, it’s unacknowledged, it’s part of our American past. The result of this is that integration at the most intimate level still continues to be a bit of a taboo. It’s the duty of scholarship, of art, of film, of all of us here to fulfill of all those voids in that story of American history.
GARFIELD: Thank you. Jeff Nichols, the Director and Screen Writer of Loving, has been held by acclaimed critic Peter Travers as ranking with the best American directors of his generation. After graduating from the University of North Carolina School of the Arts School of Filmmaking, Mr. Nichols went on to write and direct several internationally acclaimed features including Shotgun Stories, which received the Grand Jury Prize at the Seattle and Austin Film Festivals, and the International Jury Prize at the Venice International Film Festival. Take Shelter, which received multiple honors at the Cannes International Film Festival, including the Critics Week Grand Prize, and was later nominated for five Independent Spirit Awards. And Mud, which premiered at the Cannes Film Festival, was also a Spirit Award nominee. Loving was released in November 2016 to widespread critical acclaim. It was dubbed by the Hollywood Reporter at “the most relevant film this election season.” Of course, anyone who’s seen the film knows this as well. It’s insistence on the power of love to stand-up to bigotry and injustice is narrated with astounding restraint and poignancy, by a filmmaker at the top of his game. Please welcome Jeff Nichols.

Headshot of Jeff Nichols, the director and screen writer of 2016 film Loving

NICHOLS: Okay. I am definitely out of my league with these people. So, a few caveats to start, much like our president, anything that comes out of my mouth should be fact-checked, because I make movies, and I am not a professor. I thought about why I was here, and what I should talk about. And as narrow as I could possibly get I thought I should talk about the interpretation of history. Chiefly my interpretation of history.

This is the fifth film I’ve made and it’s the first one not cut from bulk creative cloth. There is a strict responsibility that comes with that. The first person I met when I started to do research on Loving was Peggy Loving, and when you sit down with the relative of this person that you are about to put on screen, you are immediately struck by how important the task you have is.

I was struck by that. But even with that, what you are seeing when you watch Loving is my interpretation of something. And that’s good and that’s bad. I tried as best as I could to adhere to the facts that I had accessible. And, at the same time I was making a point. You can’t help but make your own point through this stuff. I think it’s an important thing especially for people in an institution like this is to understand that every book you read, every film you see, is somebody’s point of view of history.

I’m 38 years old. I was born in a working middle class suburb in Little Rock, Arkansas. I have an interesting point of view on what I thought the late the 50’s and 60’s would be like. I thought a lot about, as a guy who has dedicated his life to writing screen plays, that talk about the southern experience. I thought a lot about what a southern audience would think of when they saw Loving.

And oddly enough, spending the last four months on an insane literal campaign to try and win an Academy Award I’ve been bouncing back and forth between New York and Los Angeles, in very comfortable rooms, very liberal rooms. And I was thinking about what the middle of the country would think when they saw this film. A good friend of mine, who was a minister of mine when I was growing up, I remember talking to him. He’s always been a fan of my films and I said I’m making Loving. He said “oh that’s great Jeff, that’s an important story, you should tell that story.” I said: “Well yeah, you know it has all this relevance to race, but also to marriage equality as well.” And he’s like: “Well hold on, that’s different, the Bible tells us about that.”  And here’s a man who I truly respect, and I grew up listening to, and taking a lot from. And yet he is of a generation and place that can’t wrap his mind around the validity of gay marriage. That’s who I wanted to go see this movie.

And if you’re going to do that I think you start to craft a movie in a certain way. I did not ever want the film to speak down to people. If you use this person as an example he’s an extraordinarily intelligent guy. I never wanted to preach at him. I never wanted to make him feel like he was stupid. Chiefly because I don’t think the Lovings would want that. So you end up getting a film that has a really distinct point of view and there are pros and cons to it. But it’s a point of view I was really trying to show. It is the humanity of these two people.

I was trying to make it so that by the end of the film what you’ve seen is undeniable, its unimpeachable, the way that these two people felt about each other. And in doing so hopefully I’m also not betraying who Richard and Mildred Loving were, as far as I could tell. And there’s one big point that I had to accept, that I had to go, that I had to believe to this day, and that’s the idea that Richard and Mildred Loving fell in love sincerely, genuinely, not as a reaction to the environment around them.

And this is really the point when you think about this approach that I’m talking about. They were not two young kids who were rebelling. They were not two young kids whose parents said you will not marry that white man, you will not marry that black girl. Because, and the reason why I think that’s so important, is they genuinely loved each other. They genuinely fell in love with one another. And when that is the basis of this story I feel like your arguments start to run out of fuel. And, in order for that to happen, though, they had to be in a place that was extraordinarily unique in the Jim Crow south.

Luckily, it is my opinion that they lived in such a place. Central Point Virginia was not really even a town. Bowling Green, which was the county, see, that was the town. That’s where the sheriff came from that arrested them. That’s where the judge Bazile was that wrote the opinion that helped it get to the Supreme Court, or not the opinion, but the township of Central Point though was extremely poor, very agriculturally based and there had been a legacy of racial mingling there for decades. Mildred Loving said it at the beginning of Nancy Buirski’s documentary the Lovings’s story which was the foundation of my research, “people had been mixing for a long time we just didn’t think nothing of it”.

That’s a dramatic statement to hear from a woman in 1965 because its true to her point of view. There’s a fact that is pointed out in the film through a mildly clunky monolog written for the sheriff, where he points out that Richard Loving’s father actually worked for a black man running timber. And if you think about the psychology of a white kid growing up in the 40’s and 50’s in Virginia, and his father’s livelihood, his family’s livelihood is given to him by a black entrepreneur. That starts to change things in your brain. He’s in a community where his friends, who he raced, drag-raced cars with, they were of mixed race. They were either Native American, black or white. There had been so much racial mingling there, that there really was a unique make up in this community. You can go there today, that’s where we shot the film, where we had open casting calls, the skin tones, the cheek bones, the people’s faces there are beautiful. It is a very unique bubble. And, so, it was integral to my interpretation of this whole thing, that, that bubble exists to a degree. Now a lot of people that watched the film they call BS. That’s fine. And everybody is entitled to their opinion and certainly there is a complexity on the ground of what was really happening there. There is no way that I could reach that in film.

But what was important to me, again, was that there was an environment where these two people, they could love each other for who they were. I believe it. I made a movie about it. And what I think that does is; It shows you two people that are living in spite of the laws, in spite of the social norms around them. And, it allows them, it allows you to make the argument in the film or ask the question what’s wrong with this? And I think everybody in this room knows the answer to that. That there is nothing wrong with that. So, that’s it. That’s about all I have for this. I just wanted to give you an idea of how I approached it. And I don’t know that’s all.

GARFIELD: And we have time now for some questions for the panelists.

AUDIENCE: Was there any attempt by the state to use religion as the justification for –

NICHOLS: Yeah, I mean, in the initial thing that Justice Bazile writes, which you should read, he starts off – God separated the races, therefore he did not intend for the races to mix. But that was out, bold, that wasn’t constitutional. Yeah, that was not – that was what was actually – Bernie Cohen and Phil Hirschkop, who were two lawyers who worked for the ACLU on behalf of the Lovings, I think they saw that as a wonderful gift when they read that from the original trial.

AUDIENCE: You mentioned in 1872, the legal marriage. What happened to legal marriages after miscegenation laws?

JONES: Well, that’s a  really good question. And by the way, I should send Jeff a picture of Lucy Parsons. She looks like Ruth Negga, so she could play Lucy Parsons in the movie. But it’s a good question. The Parsons had to leave once the Democrats came into power. And as far as those other interracial marriages – first of all, I assume there were very few of them in that very limited window of a few months. But yes, I assume, you know, they would have been annulled or considered illicit relationships after the Democrats took power and interpreted the law differently.

AUDIENCE: I have a question for Mr. Nichols. I haven’t seen your other films, so I don’t know if this is a stylistic question or not. This is a really spare, minimalist film with very little dialogue and a lot of eye movement and looking at each other, not looking at people. I’m wondering what went into that choice.

NICHOLS: Yeah, and honestly, I think I got flustered and stopped talking to [inaudible]. There is another big factor in terms of my interpretation of this stuff, which is that this is the fifth film in my filmmaking career. And there are a lot of decisions that come into play, just in terms of my development as a filmmaker. I think Loving, out of the five films – they’re all my children, so I’m not going to say it’s my favorite, but it is certainly the most precise in terms of its execution. Number one, I finally had enough money to have enough days to execute everything in the script. The film I had made before that was a sci-fi film, and I didn’t know half the time what I was doing. Which is usually the way I feel on the set. That wasn’t the case for Loving. Now that being said, a big source for the way that they were portrayed in the film was archival footage that Phil Hirschkop helped Nancy Buirski, documentary filmmaker, unearth in the late 2000s when she was making a documentary. Hope Ryden was a documentary filmmaker that went down to Virginia at least two times, possibly three or four, and she had this beautiful black and white archival footage of the Lovings in their home. That combined with Grey Villet’s photographs from Life magazine is really where I started building their nature, who I thought they were. I spoke to Peggy, I spoke to Bill and Bernie, but it was really through that footage that you really realize – she is eloquent and graceful, while also completely earthy and of this place. He’s terrified. He, when a camera is put on him, just withers; he can’t handle it. I saw a lot of my own grandfather in him, in terms of that, and I thought about how difficult it would be for a man like that, who, a working-class, redneck Southern guy like my grandfather, to have to enunciate the love he felt for someone publicly. I think that would’ve been a crippling experience for my grandfather, and it looked that way for Richard Loving. So a lot of what I built was based on that interpretation. But it runs side by side with my evolution as a filmmaker, which is someone that hates expositional dialogue. That’s usually because – Kevin and I have spoken about this before – it’s usually because I’m writing fake characters in fake situations and I want to try to make them sound honest, and I want to try to make their behavior believable. and so usually I’m trying to listen to human behavior and human speech, and get it right. And a lot of times in films we have characters speak their backstories and speak their histories in ways that are completely dishonest to me, and it bothers me. So sometimes to a fault I’ve made my films and the dialogue in them redundant, and I’ve tried to make it just reflect the behavior that would happen in the moment. And make that kind of a cross I have to bear as a storyteller to try and make everything exist in two hours, in that format. So what you’re seeing is my interpretation of the Lovings, but also the evolution of me as a filmmaker.

AUDIENCE: In the article in Time Magazine, evidently Mildred Loving claimed never to be African American, she claimed she was Native American. And I’m just curious, is there a reason you didn’t kind of deal with that, or how did you – because in the movie it’s not really – it looks like, yeah, there’s mix, but it looks like their brothers and family are all African American.

NICHOLS: And they look like that today. And if you go speak to her grandson, who looks very much like that, he 100% claims to only be Native American, and actually took issue with the fact that the film would claim that she was African American. Which – the film really doesn’t – if you watch the film, it just doesn’t, it’s just not [inaudible]. Again, the monologue, by the sheriff, he mentions Cherokee and Rappahannock blood running around in all of those people, and then just being kind of mixed up, as he puts it. There is actually a certificate that was not her marriage certificate, where she actually put Native American, I think on her original arrest records she put “mixed race” and she put “black and Cherokee.” I’m not actually sure she was Cherokee. That might’ve just been what she thought Native American was, although there were Cherokees in that area, but mostly it was Rappahannock. You know, the film didn’t – I don’t know, the film – there was never a time to have him talk about it. It just didn’t seem like a conversation they were having. But the thing that I find fascinating about it is really just how elusive identity is, and how personal it is. It’s certainly not something I consciously didn’t want to talk about, because at the end of the day that’s the whole enchilada. The reason why – there are lots of reasons, one of the main reasons why the state’s case fell apart in the Supreme Court is because it was based on pseudo-science. It was based on the idea, if you read these anti-miscegenation laws, that if you show one drop of Negro blood. They were trying to – you could see them in the laws trying to wrangle scientific language to support their case. And it of course was ridiculous. But no, it’s a fair question. I can’t really answer it as a storyteller. I just – there wasn’t a place where they would sit down and be like, you know, I’m actually Native American. Like I just couldn’t hear Mildred saying it. So that’s probably why I didn’t show it.

MAILLARD: And I think there’s been exceptionalism accorded to intermingling with Native people as opposed to African people. Because just think of in your own personal life, people will readily, as I said when I was up there, will readily tell you that they have Native ancestry.

NICHOLS: I am 1/32 Cherokee.

MAILLARD: Yeah. But then like, nobody can tell me that – nobody will come up and be like I am 1/32 black. One out of one hundred people can do that. And that would even stem from Notes on the State of Virginia, Thomas Jefferson wrote: “Are the beautiful mixtures of red and white just so pleasing to the eye, not like the bileless mixture of white and black, which is more akin to an orangutan,” or something like that, right? So there’s always been – okay, it’s great to have Native and white mixed together, and people would claim that as maybe some way, some entire of equality with whites that would be treated differently than African equality with whites.

AUDIENCE: Were there other states that had the anti-miscegenation laws, and then their legislatures just by the normal process vacated those laws? Were there other court decisions, either from the Circuit or the Supreme Court that addressed them?

MAILLARD: Yeah, definitely, there was an earlier one in Virginia, there was one in California, Michigan had one at one time, and then it back. So at one time there were 41 states in the United Stances that had them since 1865 all at different times. And then strangely – some of them were really surprising. Like in South Carolina, they didn’t actually have one until after the Civil War. It was more based on – I think you mentioned a little bit – based on reputation than an actual blood thing. So someone could be very dark and look like me and just be considered a white person because they were rich. The same way like in Brazil, Pelé is considered white because – Pelé’s a soccer player – because he’s rich and not necessarily based on skin tone. So at one point in time, almost every state had it, but it was never all at the same time across the United States.

AUDIENCE: This year also marks the fiftieth anniversary of Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner? So I would like to get your sense about how you view how Hollywood has treated the evolution, how Hollywood has treated interracial couples, marriages, on film and get your feedback on some notable aspects of that.

MAILLARD: Well this is weird because I’m writing a commentary on the [New York] Times for that next month and that’s why we were talking about the Times. There’s actually – for Hollywood, there are a lot of movies that are out right now. Get Out, the horror movie, that is coming out next Friday. United Kingdom, which is kind of the Loving for Britain. So I think there’s always a fear of approaching this. One would be financial, because maybe they think that the film won’t sell, and I think you could speak to that a little bit more. But then always this – I think it’s a legacy of what we think of as personal and what represents us as a people. And then there’s a body of film with an absence of interracial families, which teaches us through its absence that this is not something that is normal. Because you can walk out on the street, you can walk out here on campus and it’s like, all these kids out there, mixed ancestry. But then you don’t see that on screen. And it’s almost as if these people are saying, I’m not seeing myself on screen, I’m not being represented. And this is teaching people your own existence, your own marriage, your own family is abnormal.

NICHOLS: I’ll try and answer this as honestly as I can. I’m not being politically correct, so excuse me. But I think – for one, as an example, Loving was the easiest film I’ve ever had get financed. There were multiple people that wanted to tell the story. There were some people who didn’t want Joel in the part, or didn’t know who Ruth was, and that is a totally different conversation. But I found multiple people that wanted to be a part of this. And now you can certainly add the success of a couple of my movies and where I was in my career; that helped, all of that helped. But I do think there was an appetite to have this story told very well. So set that aside, but that’s just truth, that happened. The thing is – talking about this is – I’m part of the problem. When you hear about Hollywood, I’m a white male writer and I’m the one, when I create fictional stories, that doesn’t create an interracial couple at the center of it just from scratch. And as I sit here and think about that, and think about being part of the solution and part of the problem, I do think that there might be something to this idea that sometimes either – one, you just don’t even think about it. And that’s a big issue. LIke, you’re just like, well, it didn’t occur to me to make those people interracial. But I think another part of it is – so I’ve made five films basically all in the South, and Loving is the first one that addresses race. And that is – there’s a reason for that. When I started making contemporary Southern fiction, and I had read a lot of Harry Crews, I read a lot of Larry Brown, obviously William Faulkner and Flannery O’Connor. I wanted it to reflect things that I had seen out my door growing up in Arkansas. I knew if you take a film like Mud for instance, if I enter a black character into that film, I’m going to have to talk about it. It’s going to become – it’s not something that can just happen as a character in a vacuum, especially in Arkansas in the river in a community that is still extraordinarily segregated. So much so that when we were filming some high school sequences there, our producer’s like – I think we should really incorporate some black students into this. I said, I agree, and we did, and some of the white high school students that we brought in as extras gave them a hard time. So it’s not that it’s not a subject that I shy away from or don’t want to talk about, but it becomes the story a lot of times. And I think for a lot of writers, my self wholly included, sometimes we don’t know how to express it, how to talk about it, how to show it. Making Loving and being on this circuit, being the first feature film to screen at the African American History Museum in DC, has been extraordinary [inaudible] for me, but it’s also opened up my eyes up to my limited point of view. And I would like to think that I am now a storyteller on the other side of a point of view than I was before Loving. It is a complex issue, but I think that has something to do with it. I think interracial relationships specifically – and you all talk eloquently about this – I still think it’s something that’s difficult for Americans to talk about, because we don’t talk about sex very well. It’s why we don’t talk about marriage equality very well, either.

JONES: I just wanted to say, about 1967, that particular moment. People in my small town later used to say that the school I went to, grades one through eight, a very tiny school, that it was integrated peacefully because it wasn’t a high school. There was a lot of fear around the idea that integrating high schools mean kids would fall in love with each other, that kind of day to day interaction. And you do see that in some, you know, not only Central High in Little Rock, but other places around the country, that intense opposition to integration. The other thing is we have to remember the 1964 Civil Rights Act, which opened up workplaces to people of color for the first time, and made discrimination illegal. Various kinds, more and more housing was becoming integrated to a certain extent. And then in 1965, of course the Civil Rights Act related to voting. So it is a particular time when for the first time in history, I think, more Americans are encountering people who are different from themselves in the workplace, in school. And so yeah, 1967 I think is kind of a defining moment there.

NICHOLS: And also, when we put this trailer up on YouTube, Focus chose to close down the message section because of the vitriol. So it’s out there.

AUDIENCE: My question is for Mr. Nichols. I have two questions. I saw the movie about two months ago, I was really impressed with your work with the actors. You mention that your theme was love, and showing that they genuinely love each other, to me that seemed very real in the film. I’m curious how long were you working with Joel and Ruth, the rehearsing process, like how long did you work with them. And my second question is what exactly compelled you to make this film now.

NICHOLS: I don’t rehearse. And I introduced Joel and Ruth – I cast them kind of in a vacuum with one another, which seems a really stupid idea in hindsight. But they’re such great actors that they were able to not only build the character of Mildred and the character of Richard, they actually built the couple, which is where I think if they’re given any accolades, that’s what they need to be given accolades for. Because that’s hard to do. Especially when we got lunch together out in LA one time, like several months before we started filming, and then they should have gotten two weeks before we started filming. And we don’t rehearse, we just kind of hang out. I took them to all the real places and all the real locations, a lot of them are in the film, so they are just really great actors. What I’ll say about their behavior in the film is what I try to do on the page is set that behavior out, the way people cross through a room, the way they react to one another when they’re sitting closely to one another, if you take the first scene in the film as an example. I try and put that on the page, and then when you hire very intelligent actors, which I did in this case, they’re there with it. They understand it and it actually doesn’t take a lot of rehearsal in my experience. Other directors would disagree. There were a lot of reasons why I chose to do this back in 2012. I was flattered by the producers when they approached me, first off. I grew up in Little Rock and I attended Little Rock Central HIgh. I graduated in 1997; the desegregation crisis was in 1957. I was inundated with civil rights history as a result of this, and I didn’t know about Richard and Mildred Loving. I was ashamed of that back then and I was curious as to why more people didn’t know about them. Also, my best friend growing up was gay, and he is from Arkansas, and the man that he married is from Texas, and they got married outside of Syracuse. I was the best man at their wedding, and I realized neither one of them could get married in their home states. And that angered me. So I had – I was kind of pissed off. And also I saw Richard and Mildred’s story as set out in Nancy Buirski’s documentary, as this beautiful, beautiful way to cut through all of my anger. And to talk about humanity. Again, it seemed to disarm all of these points, just in its sincerity. And that is a – I just haven’t seen that a lot, especially something that I felt like was true.

AUDIENCE: I saw the movie, Jeff, and loved it. One thing I can tell you about it – my wife and I watched it late at night and did not fall asleep. I think it’s probably safe to say that most Americans get their history from movies, so, rather than from the scholarship that we write. Which seems to bring with it a special responsibility when you’re dealing with actual events. Now, I imagine that a lot of the dialogue we hear is made up. The reason I ask this in part is I was just on a panel with a film critic and I railed against movie after movie that depicted history and made stuff up. And the film critic looked at me and said, Michael, you’ve got it all wrong. If you want to learn facts, go read a book. If you want to feel something, go see a movie. And it struck me that this is a movie which really captures the feel of things, in a way that I think is extremely powerful and important. But I fear that most Americans who see this will stop right here, stop with the movie and never go beyond that. So did you feel that sense of responsibility and if you did, how did you cope with it?

NICHOLS: I felt less responsibility, you know, outward to an audience and more just to Richard and Mildred. There was actually a TV movie of this made on Showtime in the late 1990s, with Timothy Hutton. And it no longer exists mainly because Bernie Cohen was an advisor on that film, and Phil Hirschkop was not, and when the film came out, there was only one lawyer. And Phil is very good at suing people, and he made it so that that film does not exist. Yeah. But Mildred was alive to see it, and she said – about the only thing they got right were our names. And I didn’t want that. So I tried to adhere as close to fact as possible. A lot of the lines are taken directly out of their mouths from the documentary. I made up one big thing and I tried, though, to not make anything up that I couldn’t point to some fact. And this is more about the [inaudible], it’s not entirely striking the heart of your question. But there’s a very dramatic scene in the film where they sneak back into the county to give birth to their first child. That happened. And then they are subsequently rearrested. That happened. Those two things did not happen together. So that is my taking creative license. One to make kind of this first section of the film really laid down in a cohesive way. But also just to make it dramatic as hell. And heartbreaking. So that’s an example of, well okay I had this fact and I had this fact, I’m going to condense those two things and that’s the license that I’m giving myself. But through the whole thing, and the critic that you spoke to I think was – you’re right – I just wanted to get the essence of them and the essence of the story correct. But I’ve been shouted at at these things before for not fully understanding the tone and the situation of the Jim Crow South in this period. And the damage and the anger and the hurt that came from it, because I just made a movie that focused on love. So there are certainly people, and I think they are completely justified in a lot of ways, for saying that my point of view through the film is limited. And so at some point you just have to focus on the people who you’re trying to represent, try to get them right, and still try to make a movie that people will watch.

AUDIENCE: This is a little off topic. I’m with an organization here at UT, Events Entertainment, and one of our committees is Showtime, we put on films for the students. This is absolutely a film that we would love to bring to UT, so I was wondering if we could get your contact information.

NICHOLS: You betcha.


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The views and opinions expressed in this article or video are those of the individual author(s) or presenter(s) and do not necessarily reflect the policy or views of the editors at Not Even Past, the UT Department of History, the University of Texas at Austin, or the UT System Board of Regents. Not Even Past is an online public history magazine rather than a peer-reviewed academic journal. While we make efforts to ensure that factual information in articles was obtained from reliable sources, Not Even Past is not responsible for any errors or omissions.

Humanity: A History of European Concepts in Practice From the Sixteenth Century to the Present, edited by Fabian Klose and Mirjam Thulin (2016)

This review was originally published on the Imperial & Global Forum on May 22, 2017. 

By Ben Holmes (University of Exeter)

What does it mean to belong to the human race? Does this belonging bring with it particular rights as well as responsibilities? What does it mean to act with humanity? These are some of the big questions lying at the heart of a new edited collection from Fabian Klose and Mirjam Thulin, Humanity: A History of European Concepts in Practice From the Sixteenth Century to the Present (2016). Based on a 2015 conference at the Leibniz Institute in Mainz, the book, as the title suggests, is not a purely conceptual history of the term “humanity.”[1] Rather it looks to discover “the concrete implications of theoretical discourses on the concept of humanity.” In other words, how did ideas of “humanity” guide European practices in areas like humanism, imperialism, international law, humanitarianism, and human rights?[2] The editors argue that despite the implied timeless, universal nature of the term, humanity is both a changing, dynamic concept, and has been prone to create divisions as much as it promotes commonality. Although the volume is a study of European conceptions of humanity, the contributions are transnational, displaying how conceptions of humanity were practiced in Europe and in the continent’s interactions with the wider world over the course of five-hundred years.

Leibniz Institute of European History (via Wikimedia Commons).

The volume is divided into four sections. The two chapters in section one explore how ideas of humanity developed over the volume’s five-hundred year period. Francisco Bethencourt demonstrates how, since antiquity, ideas of the humanity or sub-humanity of different categories of people have created legal and political divisions between the rights of free man and slave, civilized and barbarian, or man and woman. Although these distinctions have gradually eroded in response to more inclusive notions of humanity, Bethencourt warns that hierarchical ranking of peoples remains “one of the persistent realities of [the] human condition,” thus disabusing “triumphalist narratives” which would portray modern notions of “humanity” as the culmination of an inevitable progress of enlightened beneficence.[3] Paul Betts looks more closely at the politicization of humanity during the twentieth century. He also shows humanity was not the sole property of progressive politics; throughout the century “humanity remained a slippery term, and could be aligned to various causes,” including fascist, communist, or racist ones which legitimated what many would consider inhuman practices like apartheid. Betts provocatively concludes by suggesting that an intellectual estrangement exists between the aspirational notions of common humanity today and those notions that characterized previous generations of internationalists.

The rest of the chapters in the book are structured according to what the editors describe as”‘three essential areas” that constitute sub-topics of humanity. Thus, Part II revolves around the development of ideas and debates surrounding morality and human dignity in the context of major transnational movements like humanism, colonialism, or missionary activity. Compared to the later sections, some of the chapters in Section II study humanity in a slightly more theoretical fashion than as a “concept in practice.” Mihai-D. Grigore’s chapter situates Desiderius Erasmus’s (1466-1536) sixteenth-century political writings as emblematic of a wider transition from theological to political understandings of humanity, and Mariano Delgado’s chapter presents the Spanish Franciscan friar Bartolmé de Las Casas’s (1484-1566) arguments for recognizing the humanity of indigenous populations of Spain’s “New World.” In doing so, they provide a study of the changing ideological conceptions of humanity rather the practical implications of these ideas. This should not detract from two very useful case studies of sixteenth-century debates about human nature; but it does raise the question of how far one pushes the idea of a “concept in practice” In contrast, Judith Becker’s contribution on nineteenth-century German Protestantism in India illustrates the practical implications of ideas of humanity by showing how the missionaries’ belief in the unity of mankind guided both the evangelistic and humanitarian aspects of their missionary work in India.

Portrait of Desiderius Erasmus of Rotterdam, by Hans Holbein the Younger, 1523 (via Wikimedia Commons).

Section III examines themes around humanitarianism, violence, and international law, and illustrates how theories of humanity practically affected European attempts to remedy or restrain the violence of warfare or slavery. Thomas Weller provides an intriguing case study on the contributions the sixteenth-century Hispanophone world made to the arguments later famously espoused by eighteenth-century Anglo-American abolitionists in their protests against the transatlantic slave trade. While questioning any straightforward evolution between the arguments of sixteenth-century writers like Tomás de Mercado (1525–1575) or Luis de Molina (1535-1600) and eighteenth-century transatlantic abolitionists like William Wilberforce (1759-1833), Weller does highlight an under-researched topic concerning what he considers “humanitarianism before humanitarianism.” Picking up the antislavery story, Fabian Klose shows that while British abolitionist narratives about African humanity helped shape the national and international legislation that ended the transatlantic slave trade, these same appeals to protect humanity also legitimated new forms of violence, like armed intervention and colonial expansion in order to enforce the ban. Further emphasizing that the relationship between humanity and humanitarianism is far from straightforward, Esther Möller shows the tensions over the concept in the Red Cross Movement in the second half of the twentieth century. Specifically, the implementation of humanity as the first of the seven Fundamental Principles of the Red Cross precipitated debates in the movement between those who saw humanity as a politically neutral concept, and those national societies involved in anti-colonial struggles, which argued that engagement with politics was a humanitarian duty. Humanity, intended as a principle to unite national societies, actually highlighted the regional and political divisions in the movement.

American Red Cross Society Building, 1922 (via Wikimedia Commons)

The final section focuses on how humanity has influenced social and benevolent practices like charity, philanthropy, and solidarity movements. Picking up the themes of Möller’s chapter, Joachim Berger shows the difficulties of using humanity as a rhetorical device to unite a transnational movement like international Freemasonry. In international forums for European Freemasons, humanity acted as an “empty signifier” which papered over national differences, but these regional differences were re-exposed whenever practical action to support “universal brotherhood,” like transnational charity, was proposed. Studying nineteenth century Catholic philanthropic groups’ promotional campaigns for child-relief in Africa and Asia, Katharina Stornig highlights the at-times dissonant nature of European conceptions of humanity. These philanthropic campaigns used universalist rhetoric of a common humanity to present a moral imperative to save distant children, while simultaneously emphasizing the “barbarity” and “inhumanity” of these children’s parents, who they deemed responsible for this suffering. Gerhard Kruip’s chapter, using church documents to explore the Catholic Church’s attitudes towards solidarity and justice, is part history and part call-to-arms. Kruip exhorts the current Catholic hierarchy to do more to promote global justice by becoming less western-centric, less centralized, “and more open to all the different cultures of the human family,” while also calling for greater state regulation and collective action to ensure a fairer distribution of “common goods for humanity as a whole.”

Cardinals leaving St. Peters (via Wikimedia Commons).

Johannes Paulmann concludes the volume by tying the big themes together with his four main perceptions on humanity. Firstly, humanity has often been defined by its antonyms, most obviously by behaviors of inhumanity. Secondly, the abstract nature of humanity allowed the concept to fulfill a diverse array of functions for a multiplicity of causes. Paulmann’s third and fourth perceptions question the static nature and universality of humanity. Not only was humanity dynamic, which its proponents often understood as a process and goal rather than a fixed reality, but many of these ideas of ‘progress’ implied notions of hierarchies in terms of civilization or development. Paulmann’s conclusion provides a welcome theoretical summary, bringing together the volume’s diverse collection of topics.

The volume’s scale and scope will make this book attractive to scholars of humanitarianism, international law, and human rights. The structure of the volume, while generally clear, could have been explained in more depth for the benefit of non-specialists. For instance, dividing humanitarianism and charity into two separate sections may require clarification to anyone unfamiliar with the theoretical difference between the two. Moreover, some chapters occasionally skirted between themes of humanitarianism, charity, and missionary, which created a bit of confusion. Nevertheless, this is a very important collection of case studies exploring the European concept of humanity and its spread, and leaves the door open to future works focusing on non-European conceptions of the term and how non-Europeans may have actively re-shaped and reinterpreted European ideas.


[1] For such histories, see Hans Erich Bödeker, ‘Menscheit, Humanitӓt, Humanismus’, in Otto Brunnter et. al. (eds.) Geschtliche Grundbegriffe. Historisches Lexikon zur politisch-sozialen in Deutschland vol.3 (Stuttgart, 1982).

[2] A vast corpus of works exist on each of these areas, which are too many to list here. For humanitarianism see Michael Barnett, Empire of Humanity: A History of Humanitarianism (Ithaca, 2011). For humanitarianism’s relationship with imperialism see Rob Skinner and Alan Lester, ‘Humanitarianism and Empire: New Research Agendas’, Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History 40:2 (2012), 729-747. On human rights see Stefan-Ludwig Hoffman (ed.), Human Rights in the Twentieth Century (Cambridge, 2011).

[3] For more criticism on ‘triumphalist narratives’ of human rights see Samuel Moyn, The Last Utopia: Human Rights in History (London, 2012).


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Hatton Sumners and the Retirement of Supreme Court Justices

We are especially pleased to post this essay by a long-time supporter of the UT Austin Department of History. Josiah M. Daniel III, of counsel at the international law firm Vinson & Elkins, LLP, received his J.D. from The University of Texas School of Law in 1978 and his master’s degree in History from UT in 1986.  In 2011, Mr. Daniel was elected to membership in the prestigious American Law Institute. He is an inaugural member and former Chair of the UT History Department Visiting Committee.

By Josiah M. Daniel, III

Working this month in historical archives and observing the news of the April 10, 2017 appointment of Neil Gorsuch to replace Justice Antonin Scalia, who died in 2016, have reconfirmed for me that history (if known) can illuminate current events.

Appointments of Justices of the Supreme Court are matters of high public interest. Presidents appoint individuals for that office, with “advice and consent” of the Senate, because their nominees share the president’s views on key public issues. After all, the final word on constitutionality and interpretation of legislation and executive actions resides with the Court as part of the Constitution’s checks and balances. And, as mandated by Article III, Supreme Court justices, and all federal judges, serve lifetime appointments “during good Behaviour” with “compensation . . . not [to] be diminished during their continuance in office.”

The Supreme Court Building (via Wikimedia Commons).

Presidents are attuned to the age and health of each serving justice in anticipation of vacancy, whether by death, resignation, or retirement. On the other side, the decision of any justice of advancing years to leave office, rather than to serve until death, has often been a difficult personal choice. For the past 80 years, that decision of aging justices has been eased by an  enactment sponsored by a Dallas congressman, Hatton W. Sumners (1875-1962).

Sumners’ statute, the 1937 Retirement Act, guarantees undiminished lifetime salaries to retiring justices and it authorizes them to continue in the adjudication of federal cases in the lower courts, if desired. Sumners had been appalled when, early in the Great Depression, Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, aged 90, resigned after thirty years’ service and had his pension immediately halved in a penny-pinching measure. The Retirement Act prevented that situation but is also noteworthy because of its role in the “court-packing crisis” of 1937.

Sumners’ definitive biography remains unwritten, but he was a significant Congressman over four decades of the 20th century. In 1894 Sumners moved from Tennessee to Texas and quickly became a lawyer. In 1912 he won the at-large seat for the U.S. House of Representatives and two years later he won a seat in Dallas’ Fifth Congressional District, which he held until 1946. His papers reside in the archive of the Dallas Historical Society, where I have been reviewing them.

Congressman Hatton W. Sumners in 1938 (via Wikimedia Commons).

Sumners was devoted to his work and old fashioned in dress and speech. One woman who lobbied him in the late 1930s described him as “the epitome of the Southern conservative [who] even wore a frock coat. . . . a relic of the past.”  From 1932 until he left office, Sumners chaired the House’s Judiciary Committee, a position he used, among other things, to block anti-lynching legislation based on his spurious and degrading view of African Americans. This did not prevent President William Howard Taft from calling him “the best lawyer in Congress,” or a 1939 LIFE magazine poll rating him most highly for integrity among all Congressmen (a video clip of Sumners speaking in 1937 can be found here).

Roosevelt’s first term, from 1933 to 1937, generated a surge of innovative legislation, commonly known as the “New Deal,” that tackled the deep economic and social problems of the Great Depression with innovations such as Social Security, relief for the poor and unemployed, reform of the financial system, and economic recovery.

A scene of destitution during the Great Depression (via Wikimedia Commons).

But virtually all of those new federal laws were challenged in the federal courts on constitutional grounds including the argument that the legislation violated “substantive due process,” the predominant constitutional theory typified by the famous Lochner v. New York decision of 1905 that generally vindicated private-property rights over other interests and policies.

On the Supreme Court, the “Four Horsemen,” Justices Willis Van Devanter, Pierce Butler, James Clark McReynolds, and George Sutherland, were committed to that doctrine; and, at the start of the series of overturnings of New Deal enactments in 1935 and 1936, their ages ranged from 69 to 76 (at the time, male life expectancy was 60). The newest justice, Owen Roberts, appointed by President Herbert Hoover in his final year in office, joined them frequently for the 5-4 majority in those cases. FDR was outraged and after winning reelection by a landslide in November 1936, the President announced his so-called “court-packing plan” to overcome this roadblock to his legislative agenda by increasing the Supreme Court’s membership from nine to a maximum of fifteen if justices reaching the age of 70 declined to retire.

Sumners had joined the New Deal legislative team when Roosevelt took office in 1933, but he was more conservative than the President, often seeking to steer a middle-of-the-road course on the various issues of FDR’s legislative program.

‎President Roosevelt signing New Deal legislation, 1933 (via Wikimedia Commons).

After a preview of the court-packing plan at the White House on February 5, 1937, Sumners made a pithy comment that was misquoted, then and subsequently, as “Boys, here’s where I cash in my chips,” interpreted to mean he was departing the FDR team because he disagreed with its tactics.

But as a letter in the Dallas Historical Society’s archive shows, Sumners had not spoken the last two words, “my chips,” and what he meant was “to go in and to do what I could to help straighten things out.”  Sumners helped defeat FDR’s plan to pack the Court with more progressive justices; but in the same letter, written after the defeat of the plan, he added that in the future “it will be generally agreed that I have been able in this matter to render a service of value to the President, the party, and the country, especially when considered in connection with the other legislation which I sponsored.”

That last reference was to Sumners’ efforts, prior to Roosevelt’s unveiling of the court packing plan, to accomplish the President’s desired result—the addition of new, more progressive members to the Supreme Court—by other paths. On one hand, he was close to and in communication with Van Devanter and the Chief Justice, Charles Evan Hughes, urging calm and patience about the court-packing plan.

Sumners to Charles Evans Hughes, March 22, 1937 (Sumners Papers, Dallas Historical Society, via author).

On the other hand, the congressman sponsored a bill to incentivize the older justices to retire by assuring the continuity of their salary if they were to do so. On January 11, 1937, he had introduced H.R. 2518:

Justices of the Supreme Court are hereby granted the same rights and privileges with regard to retiring, instead of resigning, granted to [all other federal] judges . . ., and the President shall be authorized to appoint a successor to any such Justice of the Supreme Court so retiring from regular active service on the bench, but such Justice . . . so retired may nevertheless be . . . authorized to perform such judicial duties, in any judicial circuit . . . as such retired Justice may be willing to undertake.

Sumners’ bill sailed through Congress, and on March 1, 1937, the President signed it into law.

H.R. 2518, enacted as Public Law No. 10, codified at 28 U.S.C. § 375 (via Legisworks).

The court-packing plan was defeated in the Senate, 70-20, on July 22. Most historians credit the defeat, not to Sumners’ Retirement Act, but to the “Switch in Time that Saved Nine.” That is, the youngest justice on the court, Owen Roberts, who had been voting with the Four Horsemen in those 5-4 reversals of first-term New Deal programs, suddenly voted to sustain the constitutionality of the minimum wage law in a decision issued by the Court on March 29, 1937. Commentators have noted, for instance, that Roberts cast his vote in that case before the advent of the court-packing plan, and some have perceived a jurisprudential shift already underway.

But the most recent scholarship substantially credits Sumners, who obtained an initial draft of the Retirement Act from FDR’s team, for pushing it through quickly, which did in fact induce several rather quick retirements. These retirements gave Roosevelt vacancies to fill, assuring the survival of New Deal legislation and enabling FDR to shape the Court for a long time.

Justice Van Devanter on his last day before retirement, with Chief Justice Charles Evans Hughes (via Wikimedia Commons).

First, Justice Van Devanter took advantage of Sumners’ enactment and retired on June 2, 1937 at age 78, which vacancy FDR filled with one of most consequential justices of the twentieth century, Justice Hugo Black. Then Justice Sutherland retired on January 17 the next year, replaced by Justice Stanley Reed.

In the decades since, only five justices have resigned, most recently Abe Fortas in 1969, but 24 have retired with the benefits of the Retirement Act. Some retired justices have elected to continue to adjudicate cases. Justice Tom Clark sat, after his 1967 retirement, in the lower courts for ten years, and more recently Justice Sandra Day O’Connor, who retired in 2006, has joined judicial panels deciding scores of cases in the Courts of Appeal in almost all federal circuits.

Today, two sitting justices are in their 80s, and one is 78. Will the Retirement Act encourage any of them to retire and provide an additional appointment opportunity for the current administration?

Sources:Hatton W. Sumners Papers, Dallas Historical Society.Elmore Whitehurst, “Hatton W. Sumners: His Life and Public Service: An Extended Biographical Sketch,” n.d., Web

William E. Leuchtenburg, The Supreme Court Reborn: The Constitutional Revolution in the Age of Roosevelt (1995)

Marian McKenna, Franklin Roosevelt and the Great Constitutional War: The Court-Packing Crisis of 1937 (2002)

Burt Solomon, FDR v. the Constitution: The Court-Packing Fight and the Triumph of Democracy (2009)

Judge Earl Glock, “Unpacking the Supreme Court: Judicial Retirement and the Road to the 1937 Court Battle,” Mar. 2017, Web


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Global Indios: The Indigenous Struggle for Justice in Sixteenth-Century Spain, By Nancy van Deusen (2015)

By Justin Heath

Global IndiosThe conquest of the Americas first gained notoriety through the words of a penitent priest by the name of Bartolomé de las Casas, a compatriot of the Spanish conquerors. As a moral counterpoint to the conquistadors’ lawless expropriation, Las Casas would figure prominently in most textbook histories of the “New World.” From Boston to Buenos Aires, schoolchildren still learn of the Dominican friar’s crusade against the enslavement of indigenous peoples in the Americas. For some, Las Casas’ accolades are well-deserved. Historian Lewis Hanke, for instance, saw in Las Casas the first glimmer of modern humanitarianism, suggestive of a new multicultural awareness in the modern era. Others, such as Daniel Castro, have questioned the motivations of this early ideologue of “ecclesiastical imperialism.” Regardless of one’s opinions of the man, this preoccupation with Las Casas’ role as “advocate” for the indigenous peoples has obscured an important insight into post-conquest society: Native peoples from central Mexico to modern-day Venezuela pursued their own self-interest through legal action, even during times of personal distress and communal hardship following European encroachment.

Depiction of Spanish atrocities committed in the conquest of Cuba in Las Casas's "Brevisima relación de la destrucción de las Indias". The rendering was by Joos van Winghe and the Flemish Protestant artist Theodor de Bry. Via Wikipedia

Depiction of Spanish atrocities committed in the conquest of Cuba in Las Casas’s “Brevisima relación de la destrucción de las Indias”. The rendering was by Joos van Winghe and the Flemish Protestant artist Theodor de Bry. Via Wikipedia

In Global Indios, Nancy Van Deusen questions many such received notions of the conquest. By following the case histories of particular indigenous slaves across the Atlantic, the author takes the reader to a less familiar venue: the courtrooms of sixteenth-century Castile. There, in the administrative heart of the Spanish Empire, the colonized peoples of the Americas would at times resist, at times accommodate, and at all times struggle over the legal parameters that shaped their everyday existence.

From the outset, the Spanish Crown had distinguished “cannibals” from “creatures of reason,” and “barbarous” from “civilized” nations. These formal distinctions, however, did not prevent slavers from abducting all sorts of people across the Americas to sell in the port cities of Spain and Portugal. Imperial laws permitted such transactions, provided that the indigenous captives hailed from the uncooperative “war zones” of the periphery. Individual slaves lucky enough to escape captivity in these port cities quickly sought protection under the auspices of the law. Catalina de Velasco, for example (an acquaintance of Las Casas), asserted her legal exemption from servitude by claiming the ethnic status of a native “Mexican” while her mistress staked a counter-claim that this young domestic servant hailed from Portuguese Brazil, a jurisdiction where no such legal safeguards applied for indigenous peoples. Global Indios focuses on similar trial proceedings, taking note of the various stakeholders, expert witnesses, and legal strategies that shaped conceptions of “indio-ness” (that is, Indian-ness or indigeneity) across the early Atlantic World.

Approaching a new set of questions, Global Indios has many surprises in store for the contemporary reader. The most prominent is the author’s concept of an “indioscape,” a cognitive mapping of the New World and its peoples. By the mid-sixteenth century, Europeans had realized that an entire landmass separated western Eurasia from East Asia. However, the mapping of this supercontinent was far from complete by that time. Relying upon the expert testimony of missionaries and those who had travelled to the New World, the courts pieced together a series of cultural habits and physical traits that roughly differentiated certain environments, regions, and peoples of the New World. In the courtrooms, judicial officials and third-party experts would interrogate litigants, while taking into account their physiognomy and entering it into the legal record.

The debate around racial status reveals just how fuzzy these distinctions were, especially during the early phases of colonialism. Establishing the identity of an “indio” often revolved around a series of guided questions and prejudicial observations that informed the European eye toward an ambiguous legal subject. This assessment may imply limited input on the part of indigenous petitioners. However, as the author shows, these litigants were not passive subjects before a foreign legal process. In spite of these hurdles, indigenous litigants formed a successful strategy over the decades. The vast majority won their cases (even if they continued to face adversity outside of the courtroom — in the back alleys, the inn rooms, or the roadways of Spain). Van Deusen’s book analyzes the forced dialogue between colonizer and colonized in the administrative heart of Europe’s first modern empire, where the plaintiffs shaped the line of inquiry. The author infers that these slaves exploited the ambiguities of indio-ness to secure legal protections for themselves and their families.

Nancy van Deusen’s study of indio-ness in the courtroom makes a substantial contribution to the ethno-historical study of slavery. More specifically, her book marks the beginning of a more ambitious perspective that pokes holes in the alleged parochialism of indigenous historical actors. One of the first studies to explore the trans-imperial construction of racial categories in the sixteenth century, Global Indios perhaps raises more questions than answers. That being said, the speculative turn in the author’s reasoning — while problematic in certain instances — also showcases the indispensable role of the imagination in re-envisioning the moral history of our own times. For this reason alone, Van Deusen’s is required reading for everyone interested in the history of racial thought.

Nancy van Deusen, Global Indios: The Indigenous Struggle for Justice in Sixteenth-Century Spain (Duke University Press, 2015)

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A Ferro e Fuoco: La Guerra Civile Europea, 1914-1945 by Enzo Traverso (2008)

by Alexander Lang

image

The period from 1914-1945 has sometimes been called a “European Civil War,” but that concept has rarely been put to a systematic examination. Fortunately, Italian historian Enzo Traverso’s recent work A Ferro e Fuoco, which can be loosely translated as Put to the Sword, offers some intriguing proposals for understanding the period as a continental civil war. For Traverso, this larger perspective is important as Europe continues to struggle with the memory of the violence unleashed by two world wars. Only by entering the moral and psychological world of the actors of the time, he claims, can we comprehend the ever increasing systems of violence that culminated in the Holocaust.

One of the focal points of the book is how conceptions of legality changed during the period. Traverso employs the ideas of the German legal scholar (and Nazi supporter) Carl Schmitt to explain how the pre-1914 liberal order fell to the harsh legality of civil war. According to Schmitt, in a civil war, the two opposing sides each represent a different legal order, which requires that each place its enemy in a state of illegality. Before 1914 this ability of a sovereign to declare enemies illegitimate had been reserved to domestic civil wars and to the colonies. But when the Bolshevik Revolution challenged the legal structure of nation-states by representing an idea rather than a political entity, many Europeans sought to not only crack down on domestic supporters of communism, but to help overthrow, and then quarantine, the Bolshevik “virus.”

From the beginning of the Russian Civil War (1918) until the end of the Second World War, both fascists and communists, and sometimes liberal-democrats, denied the legal legitimacy of certain groups and individuals (such as political opponents, immigrants, ethnic minorities, and others) in order to either protect the sovereignty of the state or to provide the state with tools to construct a new legal order based not on the past, but on ideological imperatives. This culminated in Germany’s invasion of Russia in 1941, a war conceived by the Nazis as an existential struggle of annihilation. It is therefore not surprising that the Allies demanded that Germany surrender unconditionally, and later executed Wilhelm Keitel, who had represented the German armed forces at the surrender. Such actions would have been inconceivable in earlier wars between nations, but the European Civil War could only be resolved through the elimination of an opponent deemed illegitimate by the victors.

Traverso suggests that our modern liberal-democratic sensibilities are offended by the ease with which many leftists and rightists turned to the legal exclusion and violent targeting of groups seen as a threat. He fears that the consequent valorization of those who stayed neutral and “above” the fray will lead us to forget how discredited the liberal order was, and how the often violent means of revolutionaries and resistance fighters were the only realistic response to the threat of Nazism and Fascism. Furthermore, Traverso argues that while not all of these leftists were communists, only the strength and conviction of communists could have spearheaded the anti-fascist movement that would grant the opportunity for aimless socialists and liberals to regain their sense of strength.

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Russian POWs being marched to a German prison camp, 1941 (Image courtesy of The People’s Republic of Poland)

Traverso’s argument is not only legal, as he describes the evolution of violence during the period, as well as the psychological phenomena of fear and hysteria. Within each he shows how the catastrophe of World War I and its aftermath laid the foundations for the greater tragedy that would follow, though he does not go so far as to say that the Second World War was a necessary conclusion to the first. More work will have to be done to demonstrate the continuum of violence and instability linked to the fear and competing legitimacies unleashed in 1914. With that said, Traverso’s work pushes us to place local violence in the broader context of an international struggle, and to place the critical moments of that struggle (the Russian Civil War, the Spanish Civil War, World War II and all of its small civil wars) in a single period marked by constant structural and psychological crisis.

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A destroyed farmhouse in Belarus or Ukraine after the German invasion of 1941 (Image courtesy of The People’s Republic of Poland)

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